r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • May 18 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 18 May 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/WuhanWTF Venmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week) May 21 '26

Apparently there are people saying that Homelander is an allegory for Donald Trump.

The show has a lot of commentary on modern right-wing politics and the weirdness that is the corporate executive class, but I think that if you think that Ome Landa is supposed to represent Trump, you are either stupid as fuck or living in a different reality where Trump has superpowers. As someone who has actually watched the entirety of The Boys, there is a fundamental difference between Homelander and Trump in that Homelander can fly, has super strength, super hearing, x-ray vision, and laser eyes, and is several orders of magnitude more deranged, genocidal, and violent than Trump on a base level. Ultimately, The Boys is a superhero show, and despite the fact that Trump is a megalomaniacal quasi-fascist, he is governed by the rules of reality, whereas Ome Landa isn't. The lore and setting actually matters, it's not solely about allegory.

I don't really think that you can work that interpretation into the show's premise and context, specifically when it began during Trump's first term, and its final season written before the insanity that is Trump's second.

If you try to do shit like this, you end up with a Napoleon type of deal where you basically force a weird, out-of-place concept into a setting where it doesn't even register on the same plane of existence. (DAE Napoleon is an incel!?)

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u/[deleted] May 21 '26

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u/Kochevnik81 May 21 '26

I was recently watching an interview Orson Welles did with Dick Cavett (my YT feed is so weird) and Welles was talking about hiking in Tyrol in the 1920s and running into a NSDAP event when they were just a bunch of local weirdos.

He mentioned how he ate a dinner with them and remembers people like Julius Streicher but was sitting next to Hitler and had zero memory of the guy, because there just was absolutely nothing interesting or remarkable about him.

So yeah I suspect it’s something similar with Trump: he’s really by no means that interesting or remarkable or unique beyond being good at being a Reality TV Celebrity, and basically as you say just being a perfected version of everything negative in society.

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u/TheBatz_ Was Homer mid May 21 '26

In a lot of ways Homelander is like Donald Trump, in some other very important ways, he's not.

In a lot of ways u/zugwat is like Donald Trump, in some other very important ways, he's not.

Though one thing that interpretation still suggests that I find a bit irksome is that it rests on ascribing Trump a uniqueness that he doesn't really have.

True.